Melanie Gross is a wonderful neighbor. She has a sixth sense about me, which I appreciate. Just when I think I can’t cook one more tasteless meal and eat it alone, she invites me for the kind of dinner you can only make for two or more people. When I thank her, I wonder if she understands how much I appreciate her hospitality.
Tuesday morning I ran into her on my morning jaunt. She was in her red sweat suit—I don’t own one; I go out in plain old clothes—so she looked a little like Santa. Melanie is slightly on the plump side and very affable. We hadn’t seen each other since before Yom Kippur, so we greeted each other like long-lost pals.
“He’s everything you promised,” I called, knowing she would understand I meant her cousin, Mark Brownstein.
“So how was it?”
“Very enjoyable.”
“Think you’ll see him again?”
“Probably.” I had his prayer book, and he had said he’d retrieve it next time we saw each other.
“That’s fabulous,” Melanie said. She looked as happy as though it were happening to her.
We continued around the corner, talking and jogging. When I meet Melanie, I move faster. All I want in the morning is a brisk walk, but Mel wants speed and distance. We have learned to compromise. Perhaps that’s why we’ve become friends.
She left me at my driveway and kept going. I got ready for my day, breakfasted, gathered my papers, and left for my class.
I taught a group of sophomores and juniors who considered themselves contemporary women, often aggressively so. In the few short weeks that the semester had run, I had been surprised several times by the intensity of some students’ wrath at what they characterized as “chauvinistic drivel” and “demeaning sentiments masquerading as poetry.” It wasn’t very much like teaching at St. Stephen’s College. I had wondered, not aloud in class but to myself afterward, whether time and experience would temper their sentiments and their tongues, even as they sharpened mine. It must be wonderful to be eighteen or nineteen and to be so sure. It’s something I missed.
The class lasted two and a half hours, which was rough going, but it was my only fixed commitment each week. We took a brief break after ninety minutes; then I didn’t feel guilty if I went over a few minutes at the end. That morning a student from whom I’d heard almost nothing suddenly came alive. She challenged the “chauvinistic drivel” proponent, saying human emotions other than anger and resentment had a legitimate place in literature, that love of the opposite sex did not necessarily imply relinquishing one’s rights. She was angry and articulate. I wondered whether she had fallen in love over the weekend or simply begun to read the assigned poems. I was glad to hear from her.
I stopped for a sandwich at the cafeteria and then drove into New York, voices from my class still ringing in my ears. I wanted to get started asking questions about Nathan Herskovitz, and I thought the best place to start was with the other tenants. As I rolled slowly down Broadway looking for a free meter, I spotted Gallagher on a bench.
Broadway is a funny street. North of Columbus Circle an unkempt median of scraggly grass and weeds divides the north- and southbound lanes. At intersections there are old wooden park benches facing north at one end and south at the other. The benches are chipped and cracked by age, weather, and use, and they bear small pieces of often painful history in engraved remembrances. On sunny afternoons they are usually occupied, mostly by old people of a variety of races and ethnic origins. Some sit in silence, some talk to themselves, still others regale fellow bench sitters. Gallagher was sitting next to a black woman who must have been half his age. On the other side of her was an old white woman with a newspaper in her lap, perhaps to keep her warm as she was raising her face toward the sun. A small van pulled out of a parking spot just ahead of me, and I swerved in without even signaling. An hour had been granted me.
I got out and walked back to where Gallagher sat between the two women. “Hello, Ian,” I called as I crossed to the divider.
His face lit up. “Well, darlin’, it’s good to see you.” He stood and clasped my hand in his.
“How ’bout a cup of coffee?” I offered.
“Good idea.”
We crossed to the other side of Broadway and went into a coffee shop. Once ensconced in a booth, I suggested that Ian try the tuna sandwich with melted cheese. These old people have a nasty habit of eating tea and toast meal after meal, and sometimes, when they’re not hungry (they tell me), tea and toast minus the toast. I try to get some protein in them, and a few calories as well. Ian obliged, which meant to me he hadn’t had much, if anything, for lunch.
“Ian,” I said when I’d given the order, “Arnold Gold thinks Ramirez may not have done it.” I didn’t want to use the word “murder,” and I didn’t need to.
“Then who did?”
“He has no idea. I know you think Metropolitan Properties is involved, but it’s possible they’re not. It’s possible someone wanted to kill Nathan because he was Nathan.”
“What are you tellin’ me?”
“I want to find out as much as I can about Nathan. Maybe something will turn up.”
“Don’t ask me. If Herskovitz had secrets, they died with him. We only talked about the weather and the landlord.”
“He told you where to find his address book,” I said, ignoring his disclaimer.
“True, true. You think about those things when you get to our age.”
“When did you move into 603?” I asked.
“Thirty-nine. Had a new wife and a new job. I worked for the city then. Drove a trolley car.”
“Were you in the war?”
“Couldn’t keep me out.” He smiled at the memory.
“Did you join up then?”
“Wanted to, but they drafted me first. Covered the whole Pacific before it was over—Hawaii, Guam, Okinawa. I was out in Guam when my son was born.”
“And then you came back to the same apartment and the same job?”
“Same kinda job, I drove a bus. Nice pension, good vacation. Retired at sixty-five. Fifteen years already. Seems like yesterday.”
From the distant look in his eyes, I guessed he was seeing it all again. When he resumed eating, I asked, “When did you first meet Nathan?”
“Hard to say. You run into people in the lobby, you say hello, talk about the weather, that kinda thing. When Metropolitan took over, that’s when we all started to look each other in the eye and think of people as neighbors. That was three, four years ago. Some folks up and left right at the beginning. They got a nice little bonus for going, and they found another place, and that was the end of ’em. Most of us stayed and worried. Finally we had a tenants’ meeting, that was a long time ago, and hired on a lawyer to see if he could fix it so we could stay. It bought us a little time is all. Then things stopped working. The elevator was off more ’n it was on. Light bulbs in the halls disappeared. Strange things went on in the empty apartments, a fire here, a fire there. Every month someone else moved out. When they turned off the electricity, that’s when the rest of ’em deserted. One day there was just the three of us.”
“That was last year,” I said.
“Round about Christmas. The sweethearts thought they’d get us out by year’s end.”
“But you must have known Nathan before then.”
“Well, we’d been sittin’ on benches for a year or two,” he said with typical understatement.
“And grousing about the weather and the landlord.”
“And grousin’, yes. Sounds about right, darlin’.”
“Did you ever know the rest of his family?”
“Probably ran into ’em in the lobby from time to time, but I never knew one from another.”
“You didn’t know his wife.”
“Wouldn’t recognize her if I fell over her.”
“Did you ever go to Nathan’s apartment?”
“Not once.”
That surprised me. “With just the three of you alone in that big building, you never went up to visit him?”
“Too far up,” Gallagher said. “He was on five. He came to me. We’d be comin’ back from Broadway and hoistin’ ourselves up those stairs and I’d say, ‘Herskovitz, stop in and rest a minute,’ and he’d say, ‘Good idea.’ I was halfway between the lobby and his place, good for stoppin’ over.”
“Did you ever eat together?”
“Nah. We ate all different. He took his tea this way, I took mine that way. You can’t eat outside the family, darlin’. You should know that.”
I started to understand how difficult it might be to form cross-cultural friendships among these old people so set in their ways. “Ian, a lot of people came to his funeral. Did he visit with people? Did he have friends?”
“Oh, sure he did. I saw him take a taxi sometimes when he got an invite to dinner.”
“Did he have enemies?” I had taken my time getting around to it, but I was glad, because now it paid off.
“Every man has enemies,” Gallagher said in a low voice.
“Tell me about Nathan’s.”
He had finished his sandwich and was sipping a cup of hot chocolate to which he had added some cream. “There was something.” He sipped the chocolate again.
He shrugged. “He didn’t say much.”
“Tell me what he did say.”
“It was a phone call now and again. He’d sit down on the bench and mumble something.”
“What kind of something?”
“That they were bothering him. He called them something in another language. Herskovitz did that when he was sore.”
“Ian, if you think of anything else, I’ll be around.”
“Well, I hope so. What would we do without you?”
We stopped at the supermarket and picked up a few necessities. Ian ate a lot of TV-type dinners. Sometimes when I saw the price of them, I thought how much better off he would be to cook up a stew with fresh meat and vegetables on his own stove. Surely he had the time. There was a weird irony in the similarity between the eating habits of Ian Gallagher and those of Mark Brownstein, one at the bottom of the economic scale, one at the top. Gallagher used his oven to heat up his TV dinners, and Mark popped gourmet frozen meals into his microwave, but the net result was probably pretty much the same.
On the way back to 603, I dropped another quarter into the parking meter. When we got to the third floor, having taken the stairs slowly for Ian’s sake, I remembered the keys Nathan had given me.
“Nathan had the keys to your apartment, didn’t he?” I asked.
“That was the arrangement.”
“Had he ever used them?”
“Not unless he sneaked in when I wasn’t there.”
“I think he gave me the keys to your place by accident last week.” I pulled them out of my bag. “Mind if I give them a try?”
“Anything you fancy.”
I tried the Segal first. It wouldn’t even go in.
“Can’t be my keys,” Gallagher said. “I got three.” He took his out and used them, pushing the door open after turning the last one.
“He must have made it for me and forgotten to try it first.” I dropped it back in my bag, feeling irritated that some local hardware store had ripped him off.
I helped Ian put the groceries away and said I’d see him soon. Instead of going down, I went up to five to try the key once more. Maybe it had been my fault that a new key had failed to work properly.
But try as I might, I couldn’t get the key to turn in the lock. In a way, I was glad. I didn’t want to relive the horror of walking into that living room on Saturday morning.
I went back to the stairwell and opened the door. Although I’ve tried not to dwell on that stairwell, I can tell you that every time I entered it, it was with misgivings, and every time I left it, it was with relief. This time, as the door closed heavily behind me, I was aware of a sound. It was like a drummer tapping rapidly with his sticks on some surface, probably the cinder block wall of the stairwell. I stopped, feeling more than my usual amount of anxiety.
The noise stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and I heard footsteps. “Mrs. Paterno?” I called.
There was no answer, not that I expected one. The sound had come from above, and she was the only legitimate occupant of the sixth floor. Above that, of course, was the roof. I suppose if I’d been a hotshot, gun-toting detective, I would have bounded up the stairs, looking for whatever trouble was up there.
But I was an unarmed female who’d never been trained in the martial arts, and I really wanted to live to see tomorrow. I started down the stairs, and the tapping began again. I moved faster. The tapping stopped, and heavy footsteps descended. Whoever it was was after me.
I knew I could detour at any floor, but what would be the purpose? Four was completely empty—or should be. The locks on all the empty apartments had been removed, and the best I could do was try to hide behind a door in one while my pursuer looked behind the doors in another. And if he had some sort of a weapon, which was likely if he was an intruder, I’d lose in the end anyway. Big.
By the time I decided to keep going, I had passed three, where Gallagher might have been my salvation, so I kept on, praying that I wouldn’t trip on a stair tread and kill myself before the guy upstairs got his chance.
I reached the door to the lobby and threw myself into it, panting. But it was too soon to stop. I ran out the inner door and then the outer one, and then, at a slower run, up the street. The anonymity of a New York street has its advantages. A woman was wheeling a baby carriage. I passed her. Across the street some children carrying schoolbags were giggling together. I went over to their side and finally looked back. There were no men on the street, no one at all who looked threatening. I slowed down. I breathed deeply. I got to Broadway and found my car.
I don’t remember exactly where I was when I got the uncomfortable feeling that I was being tailed. I was on one of the highways leading to Oakwood with cars fore and aft, left and right. I told myself I was getting paranoid, but the feeling persisted. From time to time I would glance in the rearview mirror, but it seemed there was a different car there each time. Still there was that feeling.
When traffic thinned out some, I checked more frequently. An old tan falling-apart something-or-other was behind me. You know that company that says they rent wrecks? This was one they would give away. There was a man at the wheel, but he was too far back for me to get much of an impression of his looks.
I turned off for Oakwood without signaling and saw him follow. He lagged behind as I stopped for a light at the end of the exit ramp, but he speeded up to make the green.
This isn’t happening to me, I told myself. But it was. I couldn’t drive home and let him know where I lived. One nice thing about a small town is that the police are always friendly. When I got into Oakwood, I drove to the police station. They have a big parking lot at the rear of the building, and it’s always nearly empty. I pulled into the space nearest the building and got out. As I walked to the door, the old, beat-up car glided by without stopping. I went inside. If they hurried, they might pick him up on his way back to the highway.
I had every intention of reporting to the police what had happened. That is, until I saw who was on duty. Oakwood had hired a new policeman last summer, twenty-two years old and cherubic. I am not without pride, sinful as that may once have sounded. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell that adorable child in a blue uniform what had happened.
He looked up and smiled.
“I—uh—I think I left something on the stove,” I said, flustered.
“See you later,” he called.
Not over my dead body.
I went out to my car. It was still the only one in the lot. I walked to the curb and looked up and down the quiet residential street. Nothing. I went back to my car and drove in and out of streets until I was satisfied the wreck was gone. Then I went home.
That evening I called Nina Passman. It was the first time I had spoken to her since her brother had told her about the pictures in Nathan’s living room. She seemed reluctant to talk to me, and then, quite suddenly, changed.
“I have to be in the city tomorrow. Could we meet at two?”
“Two’s fine.”
“Gordon and I have a little pied-à-terre in Manhattan.” She gave me the address. “Apartment 17C. I’ll see you then.”
I suppressed a giggle as I hung up. A pied-à-terre, “foot on earth,” an apartment in the sky, a place the Passmans could stay at after the theater or a tiring day, when driving thirty miles was just too much for them or taking the Long Island Railroad was more than they could bear. Well, at least she would talk to me.